Chris Selley: Toronto needs civic rehab — and a true Everyman mayor — to unite the city and cure Fordism

So here we are. Business as usual. Rob Ford is back, tied in the polls with John Tory. It seems highly unlikely he has room enough to grow into another victory — but it’s frankly irresponsible to pretend it’s impossible or to suggest we “ignore” him, both of which are strangely common tropes nowadays.

We tried it while Mr. Ford was at rehab: Two months of blissful pretending that the upcoming election was about issues — transit, housing, property taxes. And it is. But more than that, it is about our own civic rehab — our journey towards a city in which Mr. Ford’s re-election would be, as it should be, utterly inconceivable.

October 27 is the easy part. The other candidates, and the vast majority of us no matter who we support, know very well that everyone else on offer is a superior option to Ford More years. As it stands, it seems to be Olivia Chow’s race to lose. If things change in Mr. Ford’s favour, others will fall on their swords as necessary. (They had better, if they want to show their faces again.)

But let’s say the vote winds up as Forum’s latest numbers have it: 36% for Ms. Chow, 27% for Mr. Tory, 26% for Mr. Ford. Hands up if you think Rob Ford is just going to vanish into the woodwork. Anyone? Come on. What’s Rob going to do, open a food truck? Take over as comptroller at Deco? Settle down in Muskoka to write his memoirs?

On Friday he told Newstalk 1010’s Jerry Agar the doctors at GreeneStone had actually encouraged him to run again. “I think the worst thing you can do is sit at home and do absolutely nothing,” he said. “I love my job. … Idle time is the devil’s playground.”

It stands to reason. The man has spent 14 years screaming his brains out on the floor of city council, and he’s only 44. There are five more municipal elections into which he could cannonball before he reaches retirement age. If he didn’t run for mayor he could run for councillor. He might well win — that was a job where people appreciated him — and that’s how this whole nightmare got started.

In short, drunk or sober, Robert Bruce Ford has much more to give. And apparently 26% of us in this great city — about 212,000 people, based on the 2010 turnout — are in the market for it. They aren’t all simply loyal to Mr. Ford himself, or to his anti-elite persona. There are many of us, to take just one contemporary example, who simply think it is the height of idiocy to pay $500,000 for a hunk of granite and $12,000 apiece for pink patio umbrellas.

You might disagree with them, but they’re not crazy. They can’t be sneered into silence. And if they pick up a Toronto Star and read that “these are not your standard patio umbrellas” but rather “art” — “a strong, graphic, artistic kind of statement that defines the beach area of Sugar Beach” — they are only going to get angrier.

Neutralizing Rob Ford as a political force doesn’t mean convincing those people that Sugar Beach is money well spent, or that streetcars are the apogee of above-ground transit, or that it makes perfect sense to tear down the Gardiner, or that spending $1-billion and change on the Pan Am bloody Games is a solid civic investment. The standard political spectrum has more than adequate room for disagreement on all those fronts.

People simply need to believe that city hall is reasonably well run enough that if something cost X, then that’s pretty much what it should have cost, even if they don’t particularly like the thing in question — and that while Etobicoke and Scarborough might like different things than downtowners, they’re all getting a reasonable hearing from the chief magistrate. They need a mayor on a mission to nurture a civic identity out of this 16-year-old municipal amalgamation, and to apply whatever suasion he or she can to keep individual councillors from fomenting local grievances.

We haven’t had a mayor like that yet. Luckily, there are some reasonably credible candidates on offer who might fit the bill. Unlike what Mr. Ford says of his alcoholism, Fordism can be cured. But not overnight — not in October. We have work to do, as they say.